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“... Irish, many of them young women. Among its employees was my grandfather Sean (known in Britain as John), who drove a District Line train until ill-health forced him to retire in the 1970s. Irish muscle was most useful to the expanding building trade, reviving the clichéd image of the Irish navvy. The Irish were good workers who took pride in the belief that ...”

“... other people’s intellectual deficiencies, or the loss of background information, are rebuked by John Hamilton: ‘Preposterous as it may sound, this book earnestly considers the possibility of Pindar’s obscurity’ – that is to say, deliberate obscurity. However, though Hamilton is not afraid to engage with Pindar, he is more concerned with more recent ...”

“... separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric and of ...”

“... mansions: a two-storey five-bedroom Italianate villa which housed six servants, including a cook, butler, chauffeur and governess for their two sons. He had married into the serene and secure Talmadge matriarchy, ruled by their pragmatic mother, ‘Peg’, who used the house as her headquarters. ‘There was never any “make, make, make” when he got ...”

“... snake with her riding crop). The Langhorne family’s meals were prepared by a Negro cook and butler. ‘Don’t kill him, Dab,’ Nancy’s mother cajoled, to save the butler from an act of violence when he tripped one day while carrying a tureen of oyster stew. Chillie never lost his prejudice against the Damyankees ...”

“... Administration. The great cult film of all time in this respect is George Axelrod’s and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, withdrawn from circulation after the Kennedy assassination but now available again in cassette form. And the great artistic and emblematic coincidence of the movie is the playing of the good guy by Frank Sinatra ...”

“... as a haven by and for outsiders. In 1917 the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, dismissed several professors for protesting against America’s entry into World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had long bridled at interference by trustees and college ...”

“... of bicycle from bad road surfaces, though there were strong men who rode them from Land’s End to John o’ Groats without suffering too many ‘headers’. As everyone knows, the golden age of cycling arrived in the 1890s, with the invention of the inflatable tyre. This was a golden age, too, for the admen, who readily saw that the way to symbolise pneumatic ...”

“... O’Brien, reviewed in the present issue, dramatises the experiments and predations of the surgeon John Hunter, founder of the Hunterian, as he sniffs out his raw material – including one of the ‘Irish giants’ who showed themselves to the crowd for a fee in 18th-century London. The new, modern sensitivity to these abuses grows out of the corpse of ...”

“... country going. He thus justified what Lord Woolton had begun in the Reconstruction Committee, what Butler and Bevan and others had done, and with the popular support that all this had, he helped persuade politicians that the provisions should be secured and even extended. Gaitskell and Crosland, the radical rationalists, were very actively convinced. The ...”

“... Briggs and David Donnison make what they can of a disparate assembly which ranges from Josephine Butler and Charles Booth to R.I. Morant and William Beveridge. As Donnison points out, equality was seldom their explicit goal. Nor was the growth of a centralised bureaucratic state. Nor were trade-offs between social justice and economic efficiency. These were ...”

“... Kungsholm, pride of neutral Sweden, was sold in mid-war to America, converted to trooping as the John Ericsson, then sold back after the war to her original owners. In a burst of postwar activity, before the jet age took over, the Americans made the running on the Atlantic. In 1952 the United States, ‘long believed … fast enough to exceed the US highway ...”

“... those of the ‘spectacular’ Pope and the ‘ardent’ Chapman with that of the prosaic Butler, who is determined to convert a whole dramatic episode into ‘a series of calm reports’. Of course, Borges is doing all this through his own Spanish versions of the English texts, so in one sense there is only Borges here, no Homer and no English ...”

“... and comparative mythography, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, J.B.S. Haldane and John Maynard Keynes (for being a renegade Eton-and-King’s man who thought the college needed shaking up). Lytton Strachey returned James’s contempt: ‘It’s odd that the provost of Eton should still be aged 16. A life without a jolt.’ The only modern ...”

“... Lindsay Anderson lives in a flat in one of the redbrick turn-of-the-century blocks behind John Barnes in Swiss Cottage. With its solid turreted houses, backing on gardens, Can-field, Compayne, Aberdare, Broadhurst, it’s the haunt of refugees, and Jewish old ladies, and perhaps (Lindsay would strike out that ‘perhaps’) the most European bit of ...”